Archive for Non-Salesforce Items

Newsgator just announced they are making all their consumer RSS apps free. If you are looking for a new way to follow RSS feeds, check them out. They are my preferred service. I would use Google Reader, but it doesn’t support secure feeds and doesn’t have all these nice options.

Some of the Newsgator service’s highlights (all this is free):

No matter what client you use, everything is synced (feeds, read/unread status, saved items). This is key to it all for me.

Support secure feeds

Has a decent web interface

Has a Desktop Windows App (FeedDemon). I use it every day and love it. Better than any reader of any kind that I’ve used. Why use the web interface when this is nicer looking than any web interface, is faster and syncs all your data with online.

Has a Desktop Mac App (NetNewsWire). Mac users typically feel the same way about this app that I do about FeedDemon.

This post actually has nothing to do with Salesforce.com, but I thought it might be of interest…

I have recently become intrigued by Google Calendar. It’s ease of use is great and it’s ability to subscribe to published iCal calendars is very cool. The catch is that I can only access it from a browser. Catch #2 is that I use Outlook’s calendar extensively. Outlook is great, but subscribing to other calendars using iCal is not there. Over the past month, I’ve needed to subscribe to about 5 calendars. I did this in Google Calendar, but then I had to keep visiting that site in order to see the calendars. I needed another solution.

Enter Remote Calendars. It’s an open source add-in to Outlook 2003 that allows you to subscribe to iCal calendars. It also has functionality that lets you sync your Outlook calendar with Google Calendar. I wasn’t able to get the sync working yet (I actually deleted my entire calendar in the process. Thanks for backups!), but I am subscribing to a bunch of calendars now. I’ll try the sync later.